Server virtualization: virtual machines to exceed physical systems in ‘09

Peter Dinham
Sunday, 17 May 2009 16:05

IT Industry - Market

“This makes management tools more and more pivotal, as both virtual and physical servers have to be operated, monitored, and patched.”

And, Nebuloni’s IDC colleague, Nathaniel Martinez, says he believes the current economic crisis to be increasingly intertwined with virtualization adoption, “as the combined need to squeeze costs with the existing assets and the weak demand for new hardware are accelerating its technological impact within customer installed bases."

"The disruption is becoming visible on the supply side as well, as server design shifts toward virtualization-friendly architectures in specific segments and new players enter the marketplace, attracted by the revenue potential linked with a fully virtualized x86 server stack.

“We see hardware vendors realigning their global strategy in order to be able to generate revenue in alternative ways once virtualization will start impacting server refreshment volumes."

Nebuloni also said that, "along with the well-known benefits, virtualization presents potential challenges to IT administrators. Being so quick and straightforward, the deployment of virtual machines can generate sprawling environments, where IT managers lose visibility on the amount of VMs and on their actual utilization.

According to Nebuloni, the set up of operative procedures for virtualized environments requires an integration within the existing legacy infrastructure, “which most of the times comprises midrange and mainframe pools. Also, in many cases new practices will have to be put in place, responding to the increasing overlap in the internal areas of responsibility of the IT staff, as storage, server, and network administrators will need to cooperate more closely to tackle interconnected issues."